"Secondary storage is on the rise"

BANGALORE, INDIA: Network storage and data management solutions company Network Appliance (NetApp) that is focused on products for enterprise customers, is quietly working on adjunct areas relevant to its overall storage strategy.

Out of the company's 1200-strong engineering team, a few hundred engineers are working on areas that are part of the company's non-core product portfolio.

This division was started two years ago by industry veteran Jay Kidd, who is senior VP and GM, emerging products group at the company. Jay Kidd spoke to Priya Padmanabhan of CyberMedia News about the activities of his division, storage trends and where the market is heading.

What is your role at NetApp and how different is the division's activity from that of the core engineering team does?



Until two years ago, NetApp was structured as a functional organization. All of engineering was in one group and while all of marketing was in another.

This resulted in a situation where in if we wanted to start something small, say a three-person engineering project within a 1200 people engineering team, it was very difficult to start. So we decided to create a small organization that would work on small and emerging businesses into a separate structure that would report to the executive staff at NetApp outside of core engineering.

I joined two years ago to create this new division. We acquired two companies- Decru and Alacritus that are outside of our core storage engineering activity. Decru is into data security and encryption of appliances while Alacritus is doing work on Virtual tape libraries. Half the development teams of these companies are in Bangalore.

So we formed this organization called emerging products group. It is really a portfolio of businesses within the company. I have managers who completely own the business for encryption appliances or tape libraries and small medium business systems. By keeping it outside of the large scale enterprise business of NetApp We were able to focus on it and understand what unique requirements the groups have and fund them differently than how core groups are funded.

What kind of areas does the emerging products division work on?



We have a few 100 people working on non-core engineering products. One of them is the storage security business division Decru. We build encryption and key management solutions for enterprise data centers. Then we also do business in virtual tape libraries. We have a product called StoreVault, which is only sold in the US, Australia and UK markets now.

This targets low-end customers (those who spend $10,000 and less on storage), a segment that NetApp has never tapped in the past. We created this separate business since we knew that the business practice for these customers had to be different from that of core customers.

The fourth business unit under the division comes from an acquisition we made in December last year that helps in heterogeneous data replication between any two-vendor storage arrays.

What are the new storage trends you have come across in the market?



JK: The first is the rise of secondary storage. Customers are realizing that the spend on secondary storage is increasing. Therefore vendors are getting opportunities to penetrate customer accounts for managing secondary data storage. This wasn't the case before. The growth of the smart copy is a real trend.

The second trend is the impact of storage virtualization. VMware is changing the structure of the data center. Server virtualization is driven by cost savings, space savings and power savings. We see customers who go from having 100 physical servers each of which are only 5 per cent utilized to 10 physical servers that have 100 virtual machines.

VMware is already in this space and now Microsoft has entered the space and so has Citrix. But there are challenges. When you take 100 servers- each of them has its own data - and then try to consolidate the data down to 10, the data isn't going to fit. It has to go on to external storage. So use of snapshots and data mirrors on storage arrays is becoming more common.

NetApp helps customers in both these areas-providing data snapshots and also provision data more rapidly than the competition.

What are your thoughts of management of heterogeneous storage?



Customers are consolidating data centers and within the data centers, they are consolidating storage. This is because it is difficult to hire a lot of people. If you have 15 data centers it is difficult to hire storage experts to manage all these centers. It is better to consolidate than get more expertise. The challenge is when they bring all the equipment to a single location.

Heterogeneous storage works fine. Most customers will have two or three storage vendors since they want to maintain price competition. That model has more or less stabilized for large companies.

You created quite a buzz in the tech media when you said that storage virtualization is over-rated. Could you explain your viewpoint?



Server virtualization is really about server consolidation. But it is called server virtualization. Consolidation is the driving trend of IT. Virtualization of storage is about treating multiple storage devices to manage them in a uniform and single way.

Some customers who have different types of storage devices can virtualize the management so that the applications can work regardless of the kind of storage they use. NetApp has a single approach-the same system does SAN, NAS and all of it. There is less of demand for virtualization on NetApp since we virtualize right down to how data is laid out on the disc.

We can virtualize at the disc layer and unused areas on the disc. We can also put the NetApp controller in front of HP, EMC or IBM storage and bring our data management and virtualization on to their storage.

NetApp has so far focused on the enterprise market. Are you offering scaled down features of your high-end systems to the mid-range segment?



Yes. We offer the same features. The only difference between this and the large systems is in the number of discs they support. All software capabilities are same. What we try to do for SMBs is acknowledge that they don't have a team of storage specialists to manage these devices. So we try to simplify the administration.

What is your take on on-demand storage? Is it catching on?

Around seven years ago, many start ups offered it. But all of them failed. Storage on demand from a customer point of view is important since they can purchase incremental capacity according to their need. In Europe, we have storage on demand in pilot stage. If it works, then it would be introduced in the rest of the world. It is a question of how it is financed.

The idea of moving primary storage to a different location than application servers will not be successful. It has been tried and has not been successful. There are Technical challenges such as the bandwidth limitation. Offsite storage has been in back-up and replication.